Do You Like My Content?

How did you get started in content creation?

I was going to skip this prompt. I mean, "content creation"? What even is that? Then I read Tipa's post, where she explained what it means:

"Content creation, as I understand it, is stuff generated to be ranked highly in search engines in order to entice people to follow it to your website, at which point they will be monetized and you will eventually get paid."

Seriously? That's what it is?  Well, I guess I never did get started in it, then.

What I thought "content creation" meant was "doing stuff that other people can see or hear or share somehow".

I don't mean "doing stuff " as in cutting your hedge, even though your neighbors and everyone passing by in buses and cars can see you doing it. Although, when the guy across the road gets out his step-ladder and his power-trimmer, puts on his gauntlets, his full-visor protective mask and his goggles and spends four hours getting every last leaf just so, you have to see it as a performance for the benefit of the neighborhood, so I guess anything can be content, if you want it to be.

If Tipa's definition is too specific and mine too loose, maybe we should ask Baby Bear what he thinks. ( Why is it that Baby Bear always a boy bear, by the way? Just askin' ).

Baby Bear in this context shall be Wikipedia:

"Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts" for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Typical forms of content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, article writing, photography, videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. A Pew survey described content creation as the creation of "the material people contribute to the online world."

Okay, we can work with that. And, hey, look! Blogging's right up there!  Second example after - guess what? - "maintaining and updating websites". Partial, much, Wikipedia?

I'm pleased to see the idea of being paid has dropped out because if that was in there this would be a short piece:

Q. "How did you get started in content creation?"
A. I didn't. No-one's paid me yet.

Yeah, okay, so maybe that's not strictly true. For sure, no-one's paying me to ramble self-indulgently about ancient multiplayer games and singers I like. I wish! But back in the early '80s I did, briefly, get paid for writing reviews of videogames for a print publication called "MicroAdventurer". They would send me cassette tapes of upcoming games and I'd play them and send back a couple of hundred words on how much I hated them. Don't think they ever sent me a game I liked. Certainly they never sent me one I can remember now.

I also wrote a couple of other pieces for U.S. comics prozines that I thought I was going to be paid for but never was. The pieces got printed and I got sent a copy but any cheque mysteriously got left out of the envelope. One of them did offer me a regular position as a U.K. based interviewer of comics professionals but I figured it would cost me more in train fares to and from London than the gig would pay, so I declined. Plus I had that whole "don't meet your heroes" thing going on, even then...

If we drop the money requirement, then I guess my first content creation, or at least the first I can remember, was writing music reviews for the school magazine when I was maybe twelve years old. It's also where I learned the value of fact-checking. I can still recall my mortification when I finally realized, a week or two after publication, that the Argent single I'd reviewed was in fact called "Tragedy" not, as I'd written "Try To Believe".

In my defence, I'd only ever heard it played on the radio and the diction of the average Radio One D.J. in the early seventies left more than a little to be desired. Also, listening to the song for the first time in what may well be fifty years, it bloody well does sound like they're singing "try to believe", doesn't it?

Although that error kickstarted my commitment to checking my facts before going to print, I also followed what would become a consistent pattern and kept my mistake to myself. And, since my peer group of the time was, all things considered, even more ignorant than I was, I got away with it.

That was the beginning of a lifelong interest, arguably an obsession, with creating content by talking about content created by someone else. As an adolescent and going all the way into my twenties and thirties, almost as many of my idols were critics, reviewers and essayists as artists, writers or musicians. Although, of course, many were both.

Over the long years of my life I've dabbled here and there with fiction. I have a couple of unfinished pieces, clocking in around thirty to fifty thousand words each, that I'm thinking of dusting off, tidying up and introducing to the internet.

I was never much of a fiction writer, though. I can't do plots. Instead, for most of my teenage years I genuinely believed I was a Poet. If you'd asked me to define myself then, "Poet", with a capital "P",  might well have been the word I'd have used. I certainly wrote one hell of a lot of poetry, all of which I still have, but I was extremely reticent about letting anyone else see any of it, which, unless you happen to be Emily Dickinson, is tantamount to proof that you are no poet at all, just a diarist who can't parse a full sentence.

Fine. Have it that way. But I always could parse a sentence. That's probably why I was a lot happier to let people see my prose. And my opinions. Pretty much no-one going to get clear without hearing what those were.

Tipa hails "having an opinion" as the key requisite for successful content creation. I often wonder what it would have been like for my eighties' circle of friends, had we had today's social media back then. I quail to imagine the things I would have said and done. Still, I'd swap. It would literally have been living the daydream. 

I remember vividly, sitting in the darkened, closed bar of some convention hotel in the small hours towards the end of that decade or the start of the next, speculating wildly about the future of what we certainly never spoke or thought of as our "content creation", as it might look in the light of the miracle new technology some of us could see glimmering beyond the silicon event horizon.

Thankfully or otherwise, the slow tide of change took too long building to carry us along with it. By the time it arrived most of us were off the beach, watching from the promenade. I had the means but I no longer had the motivation. I still have opinions but they don't scald and burn the way they did. I can hold onto them for longer without feeling the need to throw them at anyone else.

All of my most opinionated "content" is safely locked in ink, scattered across various fanzines and prozines and apazines, most of them, if they survive, by now deep under dust in someone's loft or garage. By the time I was concerning myself with games my outlet was the ephemerasphere of forums and comment threads. My juiciest opinions might still lurk the cobwebbed corners of the interwebs but good luck finding those, either. I posted neither under real my real name nor the blogging handle I go by now. Even I can't remember what I called myself then.

So, that's a thumbnail of how I got started in content creation. In a nutshell, I soaked up what other people were creating and couldn't keep quiet about what I thought about it for fear of exploding. These days I fancy myself a little more louche, a little less strident. I do still fancy myself, though, as must be uncomfortably obvious. Knowing you have a problem, though. First step, yeah...?

But Tipa's right. If I wanted to create content for people to consume, I'd troll out those opinions. I'd stop using stupidly obscure titles and tailor myself some clickbait instead. I'd say what I believe and if that didn't get enough attention I'd think of something else to believe and say that instead.

And I might, yet. I'm kind of keeping that one in reserve. If I make it into, let's say, my nineties, I might fancy some late-flowering notoriety. You have to be either very, very young or very, very old before having opinions makes you a prodigy instead of a pariah. Or a prat.

For now I'll poodle along as I am, thanks. Every internet persona is a front but it's nice to front up as someone you think you might like rather than someone you think other people might like. I create content for me, mainly. I like to imagine me reading it and thinking "yes, that's what I think, too".

Not always as easy as it sounds.

Imaginary Friends

Wilhelm posted on shows he's been watching, these long indoor nights. I could do with a quick and easy idea for a post of my own right now, plus I was looking for an excuse to work my recent Netflix subscription into the conversation, so I'm going to pretend this is a response.

As I think I mentioned, I wanted to watch the fourth season of Lucifer. For arcane (maybe hellish) reasons it's on Netflix in the U.K. rather than Amazon Prime like the first three. I asked Mrs. Bhagpuss about the possibility of my piggybacking on her own piggybacked, daughter-hosted access.

It seemed to be quasi-legal. maybe. I read the Terms of Service but I couldn't make a whole lot of sense of them. There's a a lot of talk about devices but not much about people or accounts. It turned out to be a moot point anyway. Apparently shared access hadn't been working for a while.

We could have looked into that but at this point we both had a simultaneous epiphany. Why not get our own Netflix account? Radical! Sharing that, which would definitely be within the ToS, would cost us less than a fiver a month, each. That's practiacally free!

Why it took us a couple of years to come to this earth-shattering conclusion beats me. Sometimes you see the weave not the pattern, I guess.

So, we got Netflix. Since then Mrs. Bhagpuss has watched around a gajillion episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race, starting from the beginning and working forward. I haven't watched any but I know a surprising amount about it, now, all the same. Hard not to in this house.

I started watching the fourth season of Lucifer but to my own great surprise I quickly found I didn't want to, any more. There were some very obvious changes in the opening couple of episodes that felt  new-network-inspired and while they didn't make things that much different, they made things different enough to throw me off.

Had Lucifer still been on Prime, I'd have stuck with it and I will go back in a while, when I've forgotten enough about how it used to be to be fine with how it is, but the lure of so many fresh-to-me shows on Netflix was too tempting to resist. I dropped the devil for the deep blue sea of possibilites, the first of which, as I've discussed in some detail already, was Titans.

Titans was a rough watch and really not ideal for the last thing I'd see each night before I dreamed. I needed something to take the edge off before I went to sleep. Looking through the myriad possibilites I spotted something I'd wanted to see for years: Bojack Horseman.

Until now, everything I knew about Bojack Horseman came from Wilhelm's blog. That was where I first heard of it and pretty much the only place I ever did. He made it sound so intriguing I put in the effort, years ago, and tried to watch some episodes on YouTube, where everything is up at least until it gets taken down.

I didn't have much luck. All I found were a few clips but they served to whet my appetite further. When I looked into it, though, there seemed to be nowhere to watch the show other than Netflix. There were a few DVDs but they were imports, expensive and incomplete. Reluctantly I put the idea aside. Until now.

I've seen about half the first season. Let me tell you, it's no Mr. Ed. Yeah, I imagine everyone made that joke when it started. Anyone who didn't surely has more self-control than I do.

As I mentioned in that Titans piece, Bojack is rated 18, for absolutely no reason I can fathom. Yes, it's a little bit sweary and there's some sex, but by the standards of just about everything else I've watched in the last five years it's positively genteel.

I love it, so far. It's smart and funny but the real strength is in the characters, many of whom are painfully well-drawn despite not being very well drawn at all. It's also bleak as hell. If these are the early, funny seasons I have to wonder what I'm letting myself in for.

It became apparent pretty quickly that I couldn't rely on Bojack as a mood sweetener after Titans. Looking at the options, if I was looking for something as warm and cosy and familiar as an old sweater, what better choice than than Friends?

Yes, of course I've seen Friends. Like every human being alive in the '90s I watched every episode, some more than once, since it the damn show seemed be on permanent rotation on broadcast t.v. back then. The nineties were a long time ago, though. It must be more than twenty years since I last heard Chandler mis-emphasize a word. Long enough for the memory to feel nostalgic rather than nauseating.

I love sitcoms. Discovering MMORPGs gave me a fifteen year break from watching or even thinking about them but when that glamor began to wear off about the first thing I did was go on something of sitcom binge. Most of the shows I'd liked first time around seemed to have held up well so why not the ubercom? And anyway, to resist would be like avoiding World of Warcraft just because everyone plays it. I like to think I've learned my lesson there.

You'll be glad to hear I'm sure as hell not going to start reviewing Friends in 2020. Suffice it to say I'm onto Season 2 and the most surprising thing about the show so far is how much I remember and in how much detail. Oh, and how many sex jokes there are. Seriously, it's a lot.

When I re-watched all eleven seasons of Frasier a few years back it turned out I remembered nothing past about Season 3, which was hardly surprising because it also turned out I'd never seen anything past Season 3, even though I'd have sworn in a court of law I'd watched the entire series end to end. I think I can already remember entire plotlines in Friends going forward years from where I'm at now but I'm prepared to find out I'm wrong there, too.

One thing's for sure. In both cases I remember the characters intimately. As if they were people I've met. As if they were people I know.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. As I get older it becomes more and more apparent to me that what makes serial fiction so powerful is the way it  manipulates biology. Our brains haven't evolved sufficiently yet to differentiate the images and voices coming from the screen from those of real people in the room with us. When those images and sounds express an emotion it triggers a chemical reaction and we emote too. Sociopaths excluded, naturally.

The emotion we feel feels no different from a real emotion. That's because it is a real emotion. All emotions are real. It's chemistry, not metaphysics.

My current theory is that that's why I'm repeatedly drawn to ensemble pieces with recurring characters, imaginary people I imagine I like. My stupid brain thinks they're my friends.

With Titans that didn't really happen, probably because I couldn't stand half of them and those were the nice ones. None of them felt like people I'd want to hang with. They were more like family than friends and I've never been much of a family guy.

I guess I'd hang with Bojack and Diane and Princess Carolyn. Maybe even Mr. Peanutbutter. It's a little difficult to be sure. The brain gets a little fuddled with all the cross-species cartooning. I doubt there's evolutionary biology for that. I definitely feel something but it's not like Roswell or Smallville or Buffy or any of the other shows that effortlessly convince me I'm somehow part of a gang. Not a "gang" gang, you understand. Just a gang of friends.

Mrs. Bhagpuss hates to get to the end of novels she likes because what felt good feels bad when it stops. I don't have that problem with books but I do with series t.v.

It never really was an issue when I watched a show half an hour, once a week for a few months. Then a year off, start again. That's how we did it, last century. It sure is a problem now, though. These days I need a cooldown at the end of the final season of anything I really like. I have to read online reviews of the show I've just finished for a few hours to ease me out of the relationship before picking up with something new. Someone new.

Not everything works that way. Sometimes the triggers don't fit the receptors. Titans wasn't snug but I still enjoyed it, even when I hated it (that last episode sucks!), which is an intellectual response rather than an emotional one, I think. When it ended it left a supernatural/paranormal/superhero ensemble-show-sized  hole in my schedule. I filled it with The Umbrella Academy which, bizarrely, put me briefly in tune with the zeitgeist.

Netflix is very keen to tell me how popular that show is. #3 in the United Kingdom last week, apparently. Fell to #4 yesterday. Already I'm going out of fashion.

I could claim to be an early adopter. A while back, quite a while, it feels like at least a year, someone in the blogosphere mentioned the Umbrella Academy. I'm very sorry to say I don't remember who it was, but they were sufficiently convincing in their advocacy that I watched the first couple of episodes, back when we had the borrowed feed.

I had to watch it on Mrs. Bhagpuss's computer when she wasn't using it, which is basically only when she's at work. It wasn't ideal. I'm not generally much for watching shows or movies in the daytime anyway and it made things all a bit too "appointment to view" for my tastes. I was impressed but it was too much trouble. I dropped out after the first couple goes.

Well, now I'm back. Tonight I'll watch the last episode of the first season. It's an excellent show if you like shows that know they're excellent. I highly recommend it. It has convincing, peculiar characters, well-acted. It has a sharp script, some good jokes, exciting action scenes and a compelling plot. I really like it a lot.

And yet, despite the quality and the classic ensemble set up - literally a family of unrelated individuals, the trope could not be more meta - it doesn't do that thing I was talking about. I'm never inside their world. I never feel I'm one of them, there with them, sharing their feelings, their experiences, their lives.

Which isn't all that surprising because the Umbrella Academy is stagey as hell. It's camp and startling and clever and knows it. And because of it, my emotions are buffered. I feel things but at a remove. Which is great. It means I can relax and enjoy it even when bad things happen to people I like, which they do, frequently.

It's strange how these things work out. Noel Coward pointed out the potency of cheap music although I never felt he meant what I would have meant by it. What I do know is that not everything needs to be deep. It's all too easy to drown in shallow water, after all.

I've always trusted my feelings when it comes to art. I believe that makes me a philistine or a barbarian, something along those lines. Maybe an aesthete or a hedonist. An epicure?

I guess if I was more of an academic I'd know what to call myself. But then, what would I call my imaginary friends?

Long Tails And Ears For Hats : Blade & Soul

It puzzles me sometimes how certain MMORPGs seem to catch on while others don't. Blade & Soul seems like a prime example of a game that could have done as well as or better than any other imported title of recent years and yet it's entirely possible to go months without seeing any mention of it.

When I first heard the name I had a vague idea it might be part of some video game franchise I probably ought to have heard of but now I think maybe it was only ever what it is, an MMORPG no-one in the West plays. Or, if they do, they keep it to themselves.

I remember liking it quite a lot in the brief period I played, a few years back. That was when a bunch of imported MMORPGs came out around the same time, although when I stop and think about it, a bunch of imported MMORPGs always seem just to have come out or to be just about to come out or to have just closed down.

I told you that wasn't a fish!

Unlike, say, Revelation Online or Bless, where I couldn't pick my character out of a line-up now, I still remember my B&S character quite well. And a memorable character makes it orders of magnitude more likely I'll eventually wander back for another go.

It's taken a while but I'm back for that overdue visit. They say you can't go home again but no-one ever said you can't go back to some place you lived for a month, that one time. Just don't count on being able to remember the key code to get in the door, though.

Actually, I did remember that part. There really is one. I still have it written down. It was when I got inside that the problems began.

We talk a lot about the re-learning curve, coming back to an MMORPG we haven't played for a while, but Blade and Soul has more of a learning cliff. I played for two hours this evening and I had to stop and read tool tips or tab out and check the wiki before I could do pretty much anything.

It comes back to me now that I found B&S a tricky proposition the first time around. I called some of the design decisons "bizarre and baroque" but I also praised the game for letting you play it as "a traditional hotbar MMO". Which comes as a surprise to me now, having just spent a couple of hours mashing buttons action style.

This is why I have a blog , I guess. It saves keeping notes. Next time I log in I'll go through the options and see what I'm missing. I think there was a toggle to swap between traditional MMO and action combat . Let's hope they didn't take it out.

With little or no idea what I was doing I thought it  would be best just to follow the main quest line until I settled in. I was hoping the plot would come back to me. I seemed to think it was decent enough, from what I wrote four years ago.

The story remained opaque but the xp rolled in just fine. Leveling would seem to be very much quest-driven. The bar barely moved while I was completing intermediate quest steps and killing mobs but finishing two storyline quests bumped me from the start of level 31 to near the end of level 32.

A simple "Yes, Mistress" would be quite sufficient. No need to be sarcastic.

As I mentioned first time around, the writing and voice acting is polished and professional. That alone puts Blade and Soul well ahead of most of its imported competitors. It's also one of the most visually appealing of games, particularly in the character design but also in the lush, color-rich environments.

It takes a particularly good photo, too. It's nice to take screenshots that look as good as the view I was looking at in the game itself for once. I didn't need to tweak anything to make these shots pop.

It was through taking the pictures that I happened to notice my characters feet. I'd been thinking of her as a fairly normal, small humanoid, something like the local equivalent of a gnome or a halfling, maybe, albeit a lot better-looking than any halfling I ever saw. Then I noticed her feet.

She very clearly has paws. Which made me think. And When I was thinking it occurred to me that, oh yes, she has large furry ears, too. And a gigantic fluffy tail!

Really, I wonder if I should get my eyes tested. Or my brain. I guess when I said I remembered my Blade and Soul character quite well that was a relative term. I basically remembered she was short and had red hair. I somehow forgot about the tail.

Oh, geez... is that mine?

I did remember she had a giant, pantomime cat although I couldn't remember what it could do or how to make it do it. Two hours later I still can't. I'm going to have to look that up, too.

As a F2P player I get three character slots. I only used one when I played at launch. After tonight, I can really see Syp's point about it being easier to start a new character when you go back to a game than to try and pick up where you left off with an old one.

On the other hand, If I make a new character it's an odds-on certainty I'll stop playing that one, this time, before it gets to the level the other one got to, last time. So next time I come back I'll have two characters I don't know how to play.

Nah, I'm going to stick with what I don't know for now. I'm sure it'll all come back to me. If I hang around long enough.

Just A Preview: New World

The access code and instructions for Amazon's upcoming New World preview popped up in my inbox this afternoon. In keeping with all the previous tests it looks to be a highly organized and efficient affair, if somewhat over-complicated.

I never did get around to using my code for the recent stress test, or "Density Test" as Amazon like to call it. The times were very inconvenient for me. I don't think any of them co-incided with a period when I would normally be at the keyboard. I knew that when I decided to download the game, although I did think I might make the effort and stay up a little later than usual just to see what was what. In the end that never happened. I like my sleep too much.

Even so, I thought it would be worth the trouble of installing the game since I was going to have to do it for the Preview anyway. And then Amazon announced the Preview would be using a different client so we could go ahead and delete the one we'd just installed. It seemed a bit odd in as much as you'd think the information gained during the Density test  would relate to the iteration of the client used in the Density test but I'm sure they know their business.

There's what seems to be an unecessarily complicated matrix explaining who gets to play when:

 Looking at that, couldn't it be condensed into two lines? 

• All Pre-order Customers- August 25.
• Everyone else - August 25-29.

I guess it's friendly of them to over-explain. Better than the other way around, at least.

Also, 2016? Were they really taking pre-orders in 2016? If you'd asked me, I'd have said it was no more than a couple of years ago that I first heard of New World, but that just shows either how time flies or how poor my memory is. Both, probably.

A quick check shows I was writing about the announcement almost four years ago. Not to honk my own horn but I called it from the start : "It does seem unlikely that Jeff Bezos will want to restrict the potential to the relatively small FFA PvP market when there's a much greater restricted PvP and pure PvE audience to tap." Yeah, got that right, although I don't guess Jeff Bezos intervened personally. Then again, maybe he did.

I'm very keen to get my hands on the current shop-window edition of New World, partly because I've missed playing it. I was a little miffed never to get an invite to the second alpha, not least because the trickle of information that leaked out seemed very encouraging. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to the Preview because for the first time I'll actually be able to talk openly about what I see there.

Not being able to blog about my time in the first alpha was frustrating; not being able to post any of my gorgeous screenshots, even more so. Now, finally, I'll be able to say whatever I like and put up pictures, too.

Still can't talk about anything that happened before, which is mildly annoying because comparisons of how things have changed would obviously be meaningful and illuminating. I imagine some unavoidable subtext will leak through, even if unintentionally. Hard to preclude it completely and I'm not sure I'm going to try all  that hard.

Checking Steam, the new client seems to have updated while I was writing this post, so now all that's left to do is wait. As a pre-orderer I should be able to log into the game on Tuesday at around five in the evening, a highly convenient and sociable time.

There are five regions for the Preview:

It's a long time since I played an MMORPG that gave me a choice of East and West Coast U.S.A. For cultural reasons, I always prefer to play on American servers if given the choice but from the U.K. ping to the Eastern Seaboard can often be better than ping to Central Europe so it's a done deal.

The Preview lasts a generous ten days, which should be more than enough to give it a good shake. I'm looking forward to it.

Watch this space for further revelations. Er, better make that just revelations, I guess. Not like I ever revealed anything before. No, not at all.

School's Out : GW2

As we walked through some local woodland this morning, enjoying the welcome, warm summer sunshine after yesterday's storms, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were chatting about the current glut of activities on offer in Guild Wars 2. She was of the opinion that games companies like to try to get the attention of bored kids on their summer break from school, whereas I wasn't so convinced that kids are interested in the kind of games we play.

Since almost no games companies like to release demographics, all evidence is necessarily anecdotal or observational, so take that as a warning, but it's my impression that school-age players are a vanishingly-small  minority in most of the online games I play. GW2 does probably skew as young as any but even there it seems as though anyone under college age stands out as the exception.

I was more of the opinion that interest in gaming drops off during the summer, when better weather, vacation time and the competing attractions of outdoor activities from kayaking to barbecues draw players away from the keyboard and into the great outdoors. Or at least the back yard. The plethora of events, I contended, is designed to mitigate that loss, to claw back some ground, dissuade people from putting their subscriptions on hold, keep the cash shop registers ringing.

This year, of  course, is about as atypical as it could get (we hope). You might expect some extra activity. But it happens every year. Summer comes and every MMORPG lights up like the carnival's come to town, which in some games it literally has.

ArenaNet were slow to cotton on to the pattern but now they've twigged they seem keen to make up for lost time. There are currently no fewer than four major events running concurrently.

In World vs World we 're enjoying the return of the popular-with-many, loathed-by-some No Downed State.  This is a switch-flick event whereby ANet turn off whatever flag it is that lets your character fall to the ground and twitch like a swatted wasp for anything up to half a minute while your enemies try to put you out of your misery.

This has all kinds of implications, some of which apply to most everyone, others which only affect individual classes. I won't go into details or we'll be here until long after the week-long event has ended.  Suffice to say, some people like it because it makes clashes between large groups fast, furious and above all decisive, three things they usually are not. It also makes ganking people a lot more efficient, if less fun for the ganker, since a favorite tactic has always been to make the downed victim squirm for as long as possible before finally administering the coup de grace.

It's hard to say exactly how popular No Downed State really is because every time ANet employ this crowd-pleaser they accompany it with a bunch of bonuses. This time we're getting

• 25% bonus to reward-track progress
• Gain double WXP
• Receive a 50% bonus to magic find

All of which bring the PvXers in by the coachload. On reset night there was reportedly a queue or almost 200 to get in to Eternal Battlegrounds in my Tier 4 match. By the time I got to play over the weekend that was down to around fifty and during the week it's sometimes dipped as low as half  a dozen. All of those are way higher than normal.

That event's going well, then, but it pales into total insignificance compared to the return of another of ANet's favorites, the PvE juggernaut known as World Boss Rush.

This is a gimme by anyone's standards. It involves no changes to the game at all other than the addition of some bonus rewards. If you're in on a World Boss kill you get some extra boxes to open and that's it. Oh, and there's a series of  "Community Goals", whereby the server keeps track of... erm... something... it's never been clear to me what... and when the event ends everyone gets a care package based on how well the "community" did. Or something. It's vague.

But it's evidently quite clear enough to bring in the crowds. I got swept up in the Rush yesterday and ended up doing a whole bunch of World Bosses. I just missed the Frozen Maw when I logged in but I caught it on it's next pop so that was a straight two hours.

I did Modniir, Fire Elemental, Golem Mk II, Great Jungle Wurm, Claw of Jormag, Shadow Behemoth, then I skipped Taidha so I could empty my bags before finishing up back at the Maw. There were so many people that most of the fights presented as a slide-show and I failed to get credit at FE altogether because my screen froze completely. By the time I had contol of my character again the caravan had moved on to Jormag.

It's a popular event, then. Only, you can do it every day, all year, every year. Those same bosses spawn at those same times forever. On any given day, any month, there's always  a "boss train" running. This event is literally "what we do every day" and the bonus rewards are literally "more of the same things we always get".

For me, the attraction is the crowds. Obviously I don't love screen-freezes but I do love being in zergs so big they cause screen-freezes. To me, GW2's USP is a huge, chaotic, disorderly rabble charging across the countryside in an explosion of neon fireworks. That's what I don't pay my money for. So I'm happy.

I also really like the third event on the card, the Queen's Pavillion. This is a double-header holiday event in which Divinity's Reach is twinned with Labyrinthine Cliffs, of which (not very much) more later.

There are three attractions in the Queen's Pavilion. One is a mount race. I hate mounts but I love mount races. Don't call me on it or I'll bring that quote out again.

The second is Queen's Gauntlet, a series of one-on-one cage fights between your character and a named NPC. I did that the first year it appeared and got as far as the penulitimate opponent. Couldn't beat the very last one. Haven't really bothered with it since other than to tick off one of the easy round one challenges for the daily.

Third and by far the most enjoyable in my book is Boss Blitz, a round-robin event in which you have to defeat six Legendary bosses in a set time. This one has all the things I like about group events in GW2 - it takes tactics, organization, communication and discipline. If you use the LFG tool to get into an organized squad it can go like clockwork. If you just pug it in a random map it can be anything from a hysterical clownshow to a name-calling debacle. Fun for all the foul-mouthed family!

I got into an excellent squad on my first try and knocked off several Gold runs in a row. Yesterday I happened on a random PUG map that was both good-natured and intelligent and we peeled off a string of silvers. I'm waiting for my disaster map. I'm sure it won't be long in coming.

Last and very definitely least in the tetralogy is the aforementioned Labyrinthine Cliffs. Technically both it and the Queen's  Gauntlet are part of the same event, Festival of the Four Winds, but the two share nothing in common other than some daily achievements so I think of them as entirely separate.

And so, it seems does everyone else. Mrs. Bhagpuss was complaining that so far she hasn't been able to find a single group, let alone a squad, advertising on LFG to do anything in the Cliffs. I was there for a few minutes this morning and in that brief time I heard two people complaining in map chat that the zone was dead and no-one was doing any of the events there.

I must say I haven't bothered this year. The Cliffs events tend to be on timers long enough to make hanging around waiting for things to begin feel very annoying. Plus they last quite a long time and the map is very awkward to navigate. Compared to any of the other three all-you-can-kill buffets in the current feeding frenzy, Labyrinthine Cliffs feels creaky and old.

World Boss Rush and No Downed State each last a week, although they started at slighty different times. According to the wiki, Festival of the Four Winds goes on a bit longer than that, until 1 September. Maybe that will give Labyrinthine Cliffs a chance to come into its own for a few days.

I kind of doubt it. We'll be into the Eighth Anniversary celebrations and the underwater mount by then. Remember when we didn't have anything to do in GW2? Remind me. When was that again?

Now We Craftin'

Tipa at Chasing Dings put up an exceptionally interesting post about crafting in MMORPGs today.  She managed to draw Domino (aka Pentapod aka Emily Taylor aka best crafting dev ever) into the discussion on Twitter. A coup if ever I saw one.

I started replying to the lengthy and heartfelt conversation taking place in Tipa's thread but I had to stop when I realised I probably had too much to say for a comment. So here we are.

It surprises me, a little, how infrequently I seem to have posted about crafting on the blog, given how much of it I do in most of the games I play. It's a topic that offers every bit as much potential for analysis as any other aspect of the hobby. The mechanics are often at least as complex and nuanced as anything in the combat systems and we all talk about those often enough.

The fine detail of how crafting is implemented across the genre is a topic for another day, though. What drew me into the discussion Tipa and her followers were having wasn't so much the "how" as the "why".

Both the premise and the problem posed in Tipa's post are summed up perfectly in its provocative title: "Does Crafting have any place in modern MMOs?". There's an underlying assumption there that I'd immediately want to challenge, namely that things need a reason to exist beyond being what they are.

Tipa opens her argument by making a comparison between crafting and dance emotes: "Can’t play your gritty, realistic Knights of the Round Table MMO without dance emotes!" Naturally, that immediately made me think of Spamalot, which goes some way to making my point: genres are malleable. In order to make that analogy fly you have to employ adjectives: "gritty" and "realistic".

Adjectives in this context are limiters. You apply them to close down possibilities. Add enough adjectives and you can define your limits with precision. There are MMORPGs that try to do that, to keep focus, but they are, I would contend, exceptions. The genre is fundementally inclusive, not exclusive. Yes, that can become a tick-box exercise as Tipa suggests but it's also one of the key strengths of the form, that it offers something for everyone.

In her tweet-essay, Domino concentrates her defence of crafting squarely on its role in providing "non-combat" options for MMORPG players. Tipa, in her post and her replies, returns frequently to the point that crafting needs to be "for" something or, as she puts it, to be "as meaningful as combat".

I think both of those positions underplay the fundemental purpose for which crafting exists so commonly in MMORPGs. It's there for the same reason as those dance emotes; it feels good to do. Crafters - real crafters, the ones for whom, as Nimligimli puts it, "crafting is really important" - craft because crafting feels good.

And that's enough. MMORPGs are not, primarily, either social networks or entertainment. They're spaces in which social networking and entertainment can happen. It's the job of MMORPG developers to maintain the space and provide the framework. In a sandbox there are tools and in a theme park there are rides but the fun? That only happens in your head.

This is where I run into difficulties with Tipa's list of reasons why developers might choose to include crafting in their games. Here's the list:

• You want to drain money from the economy
• You want to encourage players to spend longer online, grinding
• You want to allow non-raiders a path to get near raid-quality items
• You want to give players another way to interact

Leaving aside the likely possibility that any of us could probably add another dozen or so items to that list, there's one glaring omission:

• Crafting is fun

I know. "Fun" is a slippery concept. We've all tossed that conker around over the years. The evidence, though, is that people like to craft and I'm happy to accept, for the purposes of this conversation at least, that if people choose to do something and profess to enjoy it, they are de facto "having fun".

Not all of them, I'll give you that. Some people do craft because they want to use the things they make or because they feel doing so gives them some kind of in-game advantage. I would contend, all the same, that many just do it because doing it feels good. And that's a good thing. Actions in a video game don't need to have any purpose beyond the pleasure of carrying them out.

Crafting in many MMORPGs, EverQuest II for example, involves what I consider to be a repetitive, calming, pleasurable sequence of actions. The on-screen animations, the audio cues and the rhythmical key-presses alter my brainwaves in a pleasing fashion. In this way I suspect it ressembles both ASMR videos and real-life crafts like knitting or whittling. As with those physical processes, the intent can be to produce an object of use, worth and value but it doesn't need to be. It can be to calm the mind, relax the body, change the nature of perception.

Many people knit for the pleasure of knitting, then unravel what they've knitted and re-use the wool to knit again. People whittle wood until there's not enough wood left to whittle, then discard and start over. In games, I frequently craft things for which I have no use or desire. I do it because the mechanical process involved is pleasurable to me.

By questioning the validity of crafting as a concept I worry we may be moving perilously close to questioning the existential purpose not just of MMORPGs but of all video games. By excising an element, crafting, and examining its reason for existing, we're calling into question every element of the structure that  supports it. When Tipa expresses her wish that crafting should match combat in terms of meaning , the inevitable corollary is to ask "Yes, but what does video game combat mean?"

Pulling back from that cliff-edge, I also feel the need to question the definition of "crafting" as we're applying it. Tipa complains that crafting in MMORPGs offers no equivalent outlet for creativity to that afforded by real-world crafts. "Crafting in MMOs is just the opposite of that — you press some keys and out comes an item".

True. And then you take that item and use it to create something. That's what crafters in EQII and Rift and Wildstar, just to name three MMORPGs I know reasonably well, have been doing for years. (Well, not in Wildstar any more, sadly). That's what we did in Landmark and it's what, I would contend, Tipa herself did, to incredible effect, in Neverwinter's Foundry.

And here we come to the crux: crafting in MMORPGs isn't only about pressing buttons. There's plenty of that, for sure, and as a tactile process it has immense value, but when we call it "crafting" we misspeak. We should call what we do at the craft stations by its true name: "manufacturing".

The manufacturing process, which exists in one form or another in most MMORPGs, if seperated from its tactile, emotional and psychological impacts, can indeed be rendered amenable to deconstruction along cost-benefit lines. It can serve all of the purposes in the bullet-point list above, although even the most limited and conventional manufacturing processes offer many more reasons to exist in game than just those.

Manufacturing, though, cannot readily be parted from those aforementioned effects. As implemented in many games it does provide an analogous experience to the kind of non-productive, physical, craftlike processes I talked about earlier. And, like those seemingly functionless pastimes, it has every bit as much of a reason to exist.

It's a feel thing. Feel things don't have to have a purpose that those who don't feel them can readily understand or explain.

As for what we might choose to call true crafting, where skill and practice combine to turn imagination into reality, it's alive and flourishing in MMORPGs, despite what can sometimes seem like the developers' best efforts to stamp it out. Long may it continue!

Again Again Again

Today's Promptapalooza starter is

Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

Talk about shooting a barrel full of fish through an open goal while riding a very high hobby horse. I could bore for my country on this one.

But  I won't. I'll just state my case, of which I'm certain: doing something only once is tantamount to never having done it at all. Going back to that earlier prompt, the one about favorite quotes, I could so easily have gone with Mark E. Smith's "We dig repetition". It could be the motto of this blog. Maybe it is!

But I've said all this before, haven't I? I'll leave it at that. Wouldn't want to repeat myself.

Instead, since this used to be an MMORPG blog, maybe I'll list some of the games I've stopped playing but might get back to, some day. It's not like I've done that before...

Blade and Soul - This has been on my mind recently. Not sure why. I don't think I've returned to it once since my first run ended, back in 2016. Which is surprising, because at the time, I seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit:

"I've played Blade and Soul almost every day for a month now. My Summoner is level 30 so I'm averaging about a level a day. It's just a fun MMO. It isn't very deep or complex or  sophisticated or subtle - it's just fun to play".

Probably worth another shot, I'd say.

Star Wars: the Old Republic - I was enjoying  this one enough to sub for a while. After a month or so I'd put in "around a hundred hours so far, taking one character to Level 57 and another to 35".

The main problem I had was the incessant voice acting. It was okay in the spring but when we got to the summer and I wanted to have the cricket on in the background I had to mute the voiceovers, which kind of seemed to be missing the point a tad. Then I went on holiday and it just felt like a good time to take a break.

I was always planning to come back but as yet it hasn't happened. And it's cricket season again now, so it won't be happening for a while. Maybe in the autumn.

Twin Saga - I have actually been back to this one several times. I really like it a lot. The problem is... it's too hard.

Seriously, I stopped because I got stuck. Couldn't progress. Was dying too often. I waited a few months, then a couple of years but each time I went back it hadn't gotten any easier. Quite ironic, given my initial assessment:

"Twin Saga is a very comfortable game to settle into, with a very shallow, gentle learning curve."

Yeah, I think they call that "bait and switch".

Lord of the Rings Online - I took the trouble to log in and claim my compensation. Only fair for the extreme inconvenience I suffered, being locked out of a game I wasn't playing. Shame I wasn't on the server that had the huge rollback - I might have gotten recompensed for losing the progress I hadn't made as well. I'm sure I would have deserved it.

Now that the mysterious and elusive Standing Stone Games have decided to give just about the whole of the game away for free (and yes, I logged in that other time too, to claim my permanent free quests. Of course I did.), I sort of want to give Middle Earth another run. I think playing a Guardian might be the drag anchor that stops me ever getting very far. Perhaps I should try another class. They can't all be that dull, can they?

Also I guess I need to decide over the next week or so whether to buy any of the expansions on sale for 99 LotRO points. I probably have enough left for two or three. I should at least check that before the offer finishes at the end of August.

Final Fantasy XIV - And while we're on the subject of improved free trials...

Elder Scrolls Online - Hang on, wasn't I playing this one, like, a few weeks ago? I thought so! Talking about its prospects of staying on my "Currently Playing" list (it's notional - don't look down the side of the  page for it) I did say "I can't see ESO hanging on for long." I wasn't wrong.

I'm going to stop now because the ESO thing reminds me it's less than two months since the last time I did this. For years I've been making a practice of putting up posts where I tell myself which MMORPGs I might be playing, should be playing, could be playing but currently amn't.

Sidebar - I've always wondered why "amn't" isn't the commonly-used abbreviation for "am not". It turns up in the odd high-Edwardian novel, now and again but mostly everyone just jumps to "aren't", which is just plain wrong, now ain't it?.

Hmm. Now that's what I call a sidebar. A good editor would blue-pencil that entire paragraph. Shame I don't  have one. A blue pencil or an editor. Nor any shred of self-restraint, apparently.

Ahem.

I like writing posts like this because a) they do quite often nudge me into patching up and  logging into at least one of the games in question. Last time it was ESO. This time I'm really hoping it's going to be Blade & Soul. (Spoiler: downloading it as I type...)

And b) they're ridiculously quick and easy to write.

Also, as I believe I implied at the top, in answer to the prompt, yes I do come back to the same things again and again and again...

This post is the proof of that.